Steve Stewart-Williams – författare

In A Billion Years of Sex Differences, evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams tackles some of science’s most controversial questions: How do men and women differ? Where do the differences come from? And how do they shape modern life?The result is the most up-to-date, balanced, and engaging account of human sex differences yet written, covering everything from dating and mating to aggression and parenting, from children’s toy preferences and workplace gender gaps to mental health and the politics of equality. Drawing on a century of research - and a billion years of evolution - Stewart-Williams explains why many sex differences appear despite socialization, not because of it; why in our mating and parenting patterns, humans are more like the average bird than the average mammal; and why sex differences are sometimes a sign of societal health rather than injustice.With more than two decades of research in evolutionary psychology and an international reputation in the field, Steve Stewart-Williams is uniquely positioned to challenge prevailing views in this fraught debate. Avoiding the extremes of either overstating or denying the differences, he argues that, rather than trying to make men and women identical, we should strive for a world where bias and barriers are eliminated, and where people are free to be themselves whether they conform to gender norms or defy them.

If you accept evolutionary theory, can you also believe in God? Are human beings superior to other animals, or is this just a human prejudice? Does Darwin have implications for heated issues like euthanasia and animal rights? Does evolution tell us the purpose of life, or does it imply that life has no ultimate purpose? Does evolution tell us what is morally right and wrong, or does it imply that ultimately 'nothing' is right or wrong? In this fascinating and intriguing book, Steve Stewart-Williams addresses these and other fundamental philosophical questions raised by evolutionary theory and the exciting new field of evolutionary psychology. Drawing on biology, psychology and philosophy, he argues that Darwinian science supports a view of a godless universe devoid of ultimate purpose or moral structure, but that we can still live a good life and a happy life within the confines of this view.

The Ape that Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our child-rearing patterns, our moral codes, our religions, our languages, and science? The book tackles these issues by drawing on ideas from two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory. The guiding assumption is that humans are animals, and that like all animals, we evolved to pass on our genes. At some point, however, we also evolved the capacity for culture - and from that moment, culture began evolving in its own right. This transformed us from a mere ape into an ape capable of reshaping the planet, travelling to other worlds, and understanding the vast universe of which we're but a tiny, fleeting fragment.